(The monkey, it should be noted, didn’t actually get to throw a pitch. He, or she, merely carried the first pitch ball out to the mound. But, still, a monkey?)
Baseball historians, who keep track of everything from the number of times a shortstop spits during the seventh inning stretch to the first time a left fielder from Wyoming hit a two-out double in the bottom of the fourth, aren’t quite sure when ceremonial first pitch throwing began. Most credit William Howard Taft, which is one of the few things for which he ever was given credit.
Since then, an honor once reserved for presidents and other VIPs has become a perk for local disc jockeys, people dressed like reptiles and fat cats who have purchased million dollar luxury boxes.
Some purists have railed against the use of modestly important persons as ceremonial first pitch throwers, insisting it made baseball appear too much like entertainment. Others declared that non-playing rich people shouldn’t be allowed on the same field as the rich people who play the game.
That I never got to throw out a first pitch probably is due to being neither enertaining nor rich. That, and my healthy fear that whatever I threw would come screaming back at 200 miles an hour and bounce off my noggin.
So the closest I ever came to a pitcher’s mound was several years ago, when I was part of a Cincinnati Reds pre-game media event that entitled me to stand in the batter’s box and take three swings at pitches thrown by a seventh string bullpen pitcher.
In front of several dozen yawning fans, my first two swings resulted in feeble fouls. The third pitch drifted in at appoximately 30 miles an hour and I hit a bouncer up the middle at approximately nine miles an hour. After 15 bounces it rolled to a stop just a few yards short of the pitcher’s mound. Inexplicably, not one scout ran out to offer me a major league contract.
The monkey, on the other hand, was signed by the Cleveland Indians as a relief pitcher, but later was banned from baseball for failing a drug test.
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